Ruth Bader Ginsburg

The Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg “can project the daunting stillness of a seated monarch,” Jeffrey Toobin writes in his Profile of Ginsburg this week. “She is tiny—about five feet tall and a hundred pounds—and her face at rest conveys a pursed-lipped skepticism. She dresses with a dowager’s elegance, often in exotic shifts acquired on her travels around the world; she sometimes wears long gloves indoors.” A groundbreaking litigator for women’s rights before being appointed to the bench, Ginsburg has worn many aspects in her eighty years. Here are photographs of Ginsburg as a girl in Brooklyn, as a law graduate who left Columbia as co-valedictorian (but with no job offers), as a young mother, and as an advocate whose greatest legacy, Toobin argues, may be in the cases that she argued before what was then an all-male Supreme Court—and won. Click-through for a slideshow: http://nyr.kr/W0Hkz5

5. Wow! Had no idea she was so beautiful when she was younger

That first photo really shocked me, perhaps because my whole lifetime I have seen her as a grandmotherly figure. She has sat on the SCOTUS for most of my political consciousness.

She has been an outstanding justice, almost always siding with a position that helps the 99%. It made me sad when they diagnosed her with cancer. She lost her mother and husband to cancer, and now it has hit her a few times. We will be lucky if her replacement is anywhere near as just as she is. I hope she lives to see 100 years!